Shanghai Express - Part 3

April 27 - 28, 2014

Are we there yet? My body already felt that it had marched through a whole day, but it was only early afternoon. The Shanghai Museum, an all too brief rest at the hotel then a traditional Chinese supper followed by an acrobatic show remained on the agenda for the day.  A Shanghai Express indeed!

Fed and watered (well actually beer - it's safer than water) at a Mongolian BBQ, we got back on the bus. The driver adroitly manoeuvred the leviathan through Shanghai traffic and pulled up at the Shanghai Museum.

This very contemporary architecture houses ancient Chinese art, including bronze, jade, calligraphy, ceramics and more. To be honest a museum, almost any museum is not usually on my list of must see places in far away lands. This comes from growing up and now living near to a city with a world class museum (Royal Ontario Museum - the ROM) housing extensive cultural and natural history exhibits. When away from home I prefer to be outside where life is lived, with landscapes, buildings and people, but the Shanghai Museum was on the tour, so in we went, and I'm glad we did.

Turned loose to explore on our own, my love and I spent most of the time in the jade and bronze exhibits, though the calligraphy was also quite intriguing.

I was astounded to discover that anyone could put their camera lens right up against the glass display cases. Don't even think about trying that at the ROM! A burly security guard will materialize out of nowhere if it even looks like a finger is going to graze the glass. A camera lens pressed tight up against the case? The alarms will ring out, granting the offender a 'toes skimming the ground' escort from the building. Not so at the Shanghai Museum, though flash photography was forbidden in the calligraphy exhibition.

My energy was really flagging by now so I welcomed the short respite back at the hotel. I still had not made the connection between the air pollution and my deteriorating well being. I attributed the growing tightness in my chest to a developing upper respiratory infection and treated it accordingly, but even just walking was becoming an effort. I made it to supper and truly enjoyed the feast of delights rotating on the humongous lazy susan at the table. There is a certain etiquette to these family style repasts. Far from being a 'free for all' it is actually quite orderly: each one at the table helps themselves to the food on the serving platter in front of them; when all have done so, the lazy susan is rotated until the next platter of food lines up in front of the diners. Reaching across serving platters or asking for platters not in front of you is impolite, as is turning the lazy susan while others are still serving themselves from it. One other etiquette note - and this is a tough one for westerners, who were taught to finish everything on the plate - don't clean your plate, leave some food on it. An empty plate signals to the host that you did not get enough to eat and encourages some servers to bring out even more food!

I have no recollection of the Chinese acrobatic show which took place in the theatre of the Shanghai Centre. I know I went, but by that time I was having to concentrate on just breathing. I suppose it didn't help matters that I was getting frustrated and rather annoyed at not being able to enjoy all that was on offer. Let me call a spade a spade here and admit that I was seriously p!ssed off. Then the darkness came - but I wrote about that earlier.

Morning came and with it a revelation about the perils of fine particulate matter on lungs. Now armed with asthma drugs, an N95 mask and sheer determination, I pushed into the day.












First stop the Bund, a waterfront promenade; Renaissance to Gothic to art nouveau buildings on one bank, contemporary skyscrapers on the other. And smog.

mask down for pictures :-)

Then it was bye bye Shanghai,

and hello Wuhan. My heart sank as the plane made it's final approach to the city. I was so sure the air in Shanghai had been an anomaly.

A prickling of fear invaded my spine. I reminded myself that I had appropriate drugs now - though I had no idea what I was taking - and I was wearing the best mask over my nose and mouth. My breathing had marginally improved. Onwards and upwards...

"Nothing can quite prepare you for the sheer size of Wuhan. At over 3000 square miles, this city is simply enormous." So reads the information sheet that Viking River Cruises provided. Is there any city in China that on one scale or another isn't ginormous? I suspect not.

But here is where I have my first encounter with the legendary Yangtze River. It  flows through the heart of Wuhan where it also meets the Han River.

Here we board the Viking Emerald for a four day cruise along this, the longest river in Asia. Greeted by cymbals, drums and dragon, I allow myself to be in the moment.

©2014 April Hoeller

Shanghai Express - Part 1

April 26, 2014

The shipboard news sheet proclaimed Shanghai to be the largest city not only in China, but in the world. A week later I would hear the official Chinese Government Guide exhort, more than once, that Chongqing was #1 by a whopping 5 million people. It all depends on what municipal boundaries are being used and who is doing the counting! Let's just agree that Shanghai is one absolutely gargantuan city with a population on a scale this Canadian can't possibly get her head around. It's roughly equivalent to the population of Mexico City PLUS New York City PLUS Los Angeles PLUS Toronto; 23,710,000 people packed in at a density of 3,700 per square kilometer (9700 per square mile). Utterly mind boggling! This is not the Shanghai of my imagination.

In my mind's eye this city so very far from home is a place where one skates on the thin ice between exhilaration and catastrophe, where espionage and Mahjong coexist, moves calculated on rickety tables in dark backstreets; gambits executed in the sterile boardrooms of gleaming skyscrapers; an aromatic mixture of the seedy and sumptuous -- smoking fat bubbling in woks mixing with Hugo Boss fragrance, green tea and martinis shaken not stirred, chopsticks and switchblades, gunpowder and sichuan pepper,  -- all swirling in a sea of mystery and tobacco smoke.

Sad to say the reality was much less evocative. We lumbered our way into Baoshan, the Celebrity Millennium plodding her way through a pea souper of a fog. Occasionally the cloud lifted enough for me to see that we were part of a what looked like an armada of ships, mostly cargo, all seeping into the harbour. Closer to shore the fog was less dense, wharf and building outlines emerged. By 10:30am, some 90 minutes late, we stepped from the gangway into the misty damp morning and an hour later were in a taxi heading for the Portman-Ritz-Carlton. There wasn't much to see along the way - portlands are rarely exciting places anywhere in the world and as we approached the city, fog devoured iconic skyscrapers before they got very far off the ground. Little did I know that there was more hidden in that fog than just glass and steel.

There was plenty to see just outside the hotel, but none of it particularly Chinese. The hotel is part of the Shanghai Center, an impressive complex of apartments, high end offices and department stores, a supermarket, theatre, trade exhibition center and restaurants all catering to the expat market. Here one can feast on Australian beef, sushi, pizza and of course Starbucks, or slip into the supermarket to pick up some butter from Denmark (Lurpak), France (President) or Australia (Westgold). And if margarine is more your style well then there's Flora from the United Kingdom. There are fresh breads and pastries, fruit and butcher counter with fish, chicken, and a small selection beef and deli meats. All very western. All very expensive. Perhaps some beer would help? How about a bottle of Moosehead all the way from Canada?

We opted for a late lunch early supper and not feeling particularly adventurous opted to hang out in the Shanghai Center. Besides we were still trying to digest the instructions from our Viking River Cruises guide:

don't drink the water,ever;
don't eat street food;
don't go outside the complex after dark;
restaurants inside the complex are safe, ones outside are not, except the one he rattled off directions to, but honestly I lost him after the third turn.  

I have to say that I enjoyed one of the best thin crust pizza's I've ever had anywhere in the world at the Pizza Express. Who'd have thought that?

By nightfall my throat had tightened up a bit and I was feeling sluggish. I took some decongestants and went to bed early. It was not a great sleep - coughing spasms erupted occasionally. Groggy but feeling better simply by being vertical, I launched into a day of touring. I've never been diagnosed with asthma and only once had to use a puffer after a nasty bout of bronchitis, but by evening I was stricken with an eye-watering, choking cough that erupted with almost every breath. 2am found me on the floor in the bathroom struggling for air and crying. I was sure the trip was over for me. I knew I could not go on like this. I remember praying, "Please dear God I want to go home. I want to go home. Please, I want to go home." I managed to calm the panic, ease the fear and comfort the grief, allowing my air passages to relax just enough for some less burdened breathing to return. I crawled back into bed where even sitting straight up sleep managed to find me. A scant 3 hours sleep was enough to ease a bit more of my anxiety but I was still plagued intermittently by choked off breathing accompanied by a profound sluggishness of body and soul; every movement was an effort. Underneath it all was a deep fear that come night, the wheezing and choking would begin again.

My love searched the internet for possible causes, keying in my symptoms and scanning the results. He also checked flights for home, but didn't tell me until days later. By breakfast we had the answers, or the most likely culprit and the solution: "Fine Particulate Matter," something air quality experts call pm2.5. It's a bad thing for lungs in general with even just  short term exposure. The air quality index (pm2.5) in Shanghai had been 215 in the night and was now sitting at 180. We had no idea that air pollution was a problem other than in Beijing. Now we knew better.

http://aqicn.org/city/shanghai/

My lungs were not up to the challenge, but there were places to go and things to see and we'd come so far... so with the aid of some anti-asthmatic meds purchased at the western-ish pharmacy in the Shanghai Center (accomplished with much hand waving and other gestures) and the N95 masks we'd brought for Beijing, I pushed myself out the door.

I AM smiling!

(stay tuned for Shanghai Express Part 2 - way less words, way more pictures!)

©2014 April Hoeller